Spartan
by Connor Xfor
Summary: What does it mean to be a Spartan? Ongoing collection of shorter stories
1. Distance

**Petty Officer 1** **st** **class /:ERROR:NAME REDACTED:\\\, Jungles of Fameno, 27** **th** **July 2556, Operation THROWBACK**

Range wasn't his problem. He had taken longer shots with less accurate rifles before. His crosshairs were zeroed in perfectly, or so his armour's metrics showed him. His target? A currently empty elaborately decorated balcony outside a pristine white house which sat nestled on a plateau amongst Fameno's incredibly steep, jungle-carpeted mountains. The prospect of building a serviceable road to this lone location in the middle of the wilderness was not feasible, so the only way to leave the private manor of the United Rebel Front's top military leader was by aircraft, like the ex-UNSC UH-144 Falcon tilt-and-traverse rotor wing utility helicopter currently squatting on the landing pad hanging off of the edge of the plateau's cliffs.

This woman had to die. She had caused the deaths of many UNSC personnel and innocent civilians alike. Her actions had led to at least five terroristic attacks on UNSC bases, recruitment offices and factories over the last three years, ever since the bloody, decades-long conflict between humanity and a dominating alien hegemony known as the Covenant. They had not had enough time to mourn their dead before the ultranationalist Insurrection that had threatened to tear them apart before the War reared its ugly head yet again, capitalising on discontent in the UNSC's strategic decisions to abandon some colonies during the war to incite anti-United Earth Government sentiment once again. So as a key part of this threat, she had to die.

The decision had been made far above his pay grade, in the shadowy realms of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and he was here to execute the order from 3000 metres away. For the average UNSC marksman with the standard issue SRS99-S5 sniper rifle, this would be an impossible task. Not for him. For one thing, he was no ordinary marksman, he was the best shot in his training group of 300, consistently scoring bulls-eyes from up to 3500 metres distant with an unmodified rifle and no spotter. For another thing, he wasn't using the standard issue rifle. The bulky weapon at his shoulder was the SRSX, a bolt-action rifle shooting the devastating 12.7x104mm round. This gun was certified up to 3000 metres, and its bolt-action allowed for much higher accuracy compared to the semi-automatic sniper rifles in service. And lastly, he was no ordinary marksman for another reason; he was a Spartan.

The high-magnification scope attached to the scope rail on his weapon buzzed and whined mechanically as he scanned the jungle valley before him, keeping an eye on the three well-placed anti-aircraft batteries strategically located around the area. He was far above them, near the peak of one of the smaller mountains in the region, looking down on the house and its plateau. It had taken him two weeks of treacherous hiking to reach this vantage point unseen, dropped off dozens of kilometres away by a UNSC Owl stealth dropship with his rifle and rations. He had marched up and down thickly forested slopes, through rivers and swamps, rappelled down cliff sides and crossed deadly ravines. All part of the job. The heat had been unbearable, and the lining of his Semi-Powered Infiltrator armour had begun to stink after day two. He shuddered to think what he must smell like now, but he had quickly gotten used to the smell. He hadn't dared take the photo-reactive armour off to bathe at any point, as there could be URF monitoring drones scanning the area at any time.

He checked the status of the cloaking of his armour, visually inspecting his forearm for any signs of panel washout or damage. The armour was a miracle of modern engineering, a mesh of photo-reactive panelling so effective that although no-one could ever accuse him of being invisible, he was certainly incredibly difficult to spot in any spectrum. The panelling on his forearm had taken up the mottled green hues of the moss he lay on, giving him near-perfect camouflage as he laid prone on the forest floor, aiming downwards at his target.

A large native insect buzzed around his helmet, evidently intrigued by the faint scent of sweat leaking through the seals. The SPI armour was not vacuum proof, unlike its big brother MJOLNIR. He had a MJOLNIR set waiting for him back aboard the _Renovatio_ , but the added bulk and noise of the armour, coupled with its lack of stealth capabilities made it a second choice to the SPI. He still missed the energy shielding though. He didn't break his concentration to swat the winged invertebrate away, both hands clenching his rifle. He had been holding this position for several hours now and every part of him ached. But according to intelligence gathered by ONI, the target was here.

They weren't wrong. His heart rate increased as the large patio doors to the balcony swung open and his target strolled out nonchalantly. She was wearing a wide sun hat, tank top and shorts, perfectly suited to the heat of the planet, a complete contrast to the identification images he had memorised before he set off in which she had been wearing the well-pressed uniform of a UNSC Army General. The target sat down in a deck chair on the balcony and laid back, drink in hand, relaxing in the dying sunlight as the day drew to a close. He began his calculations, taking into account the effect that his elevation, the humidity, heat, wind and even the planets (slightly lower that earth's) gravity would have on the bullet's flight path. He could rely on the targeting computer nestled in the foliage next to him to work these things out for him, but a good sniper always double checked his calculations, and never relied on machines. His mental arithmetic calculated a corrective trajectory which was confirmed by the computer's calculus a half-second after he had arrived at it.

A silent smile stretched across his scarred lips as he adjusted the scope on his weapon delicately, compensating for the extreme range and elevation, and the Coriolis effect, the fact that his shot was at such a distance that the rotation of the planet would affect the final placement. His scope beeped in his HUD, signalling that it was ready, and that it would automatically compensate for changing wind speed and direction throughout the shot. He leaned forward and quickly removed the polymer jacket from the rifle's barrel, which had been up until this point warming the barrel to avoid the accuracy issues caused by the colder temperature of the bore for the first bullet fired than the proceeding rounds. At shorter ranges, the "cold-bore" effect would not overtly affect flight ballistics with modern ammunition. But at these extreme ranges, every factor needed to be taken into account.

He settled behind the rifle, staring down the scope at his target as she lay there, out in the open, content to sunbathe in the evening glow. Why wouldn't she? There had been no report of UNSC activity on this half of the planet for months, and she was in as secluded and remote a location as possible. There was nothing to fear.

Breaths came slow and deep to him now as he entered a relaxed state of mind, focussing all his energy on preparing for the shot. His shoulders de-tensed, his consciousness clear and free of distractions, his finger curling around the trigger.

And then he appeared. From out of his scope's field of view, a small child, no older that 5 or 6, walked up to the target and tapped her on the shoulder. He froze, his finger coming off of the trigger quickly, his mind racing, trapped in a time long past.

He was 5. On New Hamburg. His mother had just come home from her job at the hospital. He would never forget her face, the worry lines around her eyes and wrinkles around her nose that would suggest she spent a lot of time smiling. He had been so happy to see her. His father was away, seeing to business in Rhineland on the other side of the planet. He missed him, but he video called every night to talk to him. They had been happy. He wanted to show his mother a drawing he'd made in school that day. He specifically remembered it had been a picture of the cows that grazed outside his house in the fields behind the back yard. He was so proud of it.

She had died instantly. Which he supposed he should be grateful for. No pain, no suffering, just instant release. Their evac ship had been hit by a covenant round, and his mom had been flung around the cabin and broken her neck. He had watched the medics work on her as they soared away from the destruction, numb and broken. None of them would look at him. They all just talked about him to each other, as if he was deaf. When they covered her in the blanket he just watched, not believing his eyes, his drawing was still clutched in her hand as they tucked it into the folds of the fabric.

Once they had broken orbit and boarded an evacuation freighter headed for Wellsburg, he had learned of his father's death below. At that point he wasn't really lucid, just walking around the ship, shuffling from one area to the next until he found Hilda. She had taken him in, hugged him and cried with him during the 48 hour journey through slip space. She had lost both her sons, and reminded him of his mom. He would never forget her or what she had done for him in those days.

They had barely stepped foot on Wellsburgian soil before a black-suited Naval officer had taken him away from Hilda and her husband Jack, citing some UEG regulation that now he couldn't or wouldn't remember. Less than two weeks later he was training to become a Spartan. The candidates had been selected at 6 years old based on their parents having been killed by the Covenant. He wanted to kill them all. And the rest was history.

And now, here he was, unable to tear his eyes away from the blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy showing his mother his toys. They looked as happy as he had been once. How could he tear that apart for some Rear Admiral's Mission Objective. Was that all she was? A tick in the "Mission complete" column on his Service Record? What about the kid? Would he grow up haunted by the dreams of his mother's death as he was? Would this tragic loss at the hands of the dreaded imperialist UNSC sympathise him to the URF's teachings? Where had the UNSC been when his homeworld was glassed?

Suddenly the repercussions of this mission spiralled around in his head, breaking any shred of concentration or objectivity he had. If he did this, he was no better than the covenant, ripping a young boy from his beloved mother so cruelly. But if he didn't he'd be court martialled for sure, and who knows how many more innocent servicemen and women would have their lives ruined by this woman. She was no longer just a target in the crosshairs to him.

However, what she had done across the quadrant had to be answered for. Visions of scattered bodies, broken and burned floated to the surface of his mind; a couple still hand in hand as they lay, their forms twisted and shattered, a tattered UNSC uniform found twenty metres away from its owner, a child's toy melted and warped by flame.

Conflicting emotions boiled in his mind, and he growled in frustration as he re-zeroed his rifle on the target's centre of mass. Could he do it? He knew he would lose some part of him if he pulled the trigger on this forest world, and he had to be willing to make the sacrifice.

He centred himself again and let his mind go blank, breathing slowly. The target laughed with her child. He curled his finger on the trigger. He held back a tear as she settled back into her seat, the child now playing next to her happily in the warm sunlight. He exhaled smoothly, stabilising his body for the final milliseconds of the shot.

The recoil of the rifle barely registered to him as he worked the bolt action, sending a large brass casing spinning into the foliage next to him. He glanced down his scope to confirm target hit and quickly collapsed the rifle, feeling more disgusted with himself than he ever had been before. By the time that the echoing crack of the rifle reached the target's location 8.74 seconds later, 5.74 seconds after the bullet had, he was already moving out towards his extraction point 20 kilometres away. By the time the URF security team had pinpointed the trajectory of the round and discovered his firing position, all they would find upon inspection was a depression in the mossy undergrowth and a single .50 calibre shell casing balanced on its end in the middle of it.

What Spartan Josef-G164 had left behind on that lonely jungle mountain slope was considerably more.

The end.


	2. Interrogation

**Petty Officer 2** **nd** **Class /:ERROR:NAME REDACTED:\\\, Fort Haywood, Plume, 2527**

"We can do this all night sweetheart" The thug said as he prepared to take another swing at her. Beads of sweat trickled down his bald head and off of his muscular forearms, exposed by the rolled up sleeves of his dull grey fatigues. "One of you is going to talk. Why not you? What do you owe the UNSC? You're just a tool to them, expendable. Even with all that fancy armour."

Silence fell on them. Her eyes never left the damp concrete wall opposite her in the interrogation room. A dull throbbing pain crept up on her as she felt her jaw starting to swell from the multiple blows the thug had delivered in his attempts to pry information out of them. Normally she would simply stand up out of the chair that they had sat her in and crush the man's windpipe with an armoured grip, but at the current moment that course of action was not viable. This was in part due to the fact that the force that had captured her team had removed the gauntlet from her armour suit, leaving her with only thin, delicate, scarred fingers with which to choke him out. Also, she couldn't move.

The unsettling vibrations of the neural inhibition collar clasped to her lower neck rumbled through her as the machines electro-magnetic and chemical mechanisms blocked any movement from below the neck, excluding her autonomic muscles, her heart, diaphragm etc. But her limbs and core were paralysed. So as much as she'd like to reach up and defend herself from the interrogator's clumsy strikes, she couldn't. And so she had to take them.

They would never get anything out of her. 10 years of training had prepared her for just such a scenario, and the highly illegal metabolic alterations made to her liver and kidneys meant that any chemical agents designed to make her talk would be next to useless. They had already tried that tactic three times in the 13 hours she'd been locked up in this room. The first time, the doctor had tried to inject the serum into her neck. She had left the room with one fewer finger attached than she had entered with. Since then they'd resorted to pushing it into a minor vein in her left hand after they'd managed to figure out how the Mjolnir's glove came off.

She wondered how the others were doing. Certainly they had not spoken yet, otherwise the Insurrectionists would have already given up on her.

The thug turned around from the table in the corner of the room, wrapping gauze around his already bruised knuckles, shooting her that same glance of hatred and frustration that had been developing all night. "How old are you? You don't look more than eighteen, and you must have been through at least a few years of boot camp." He crouched down in front of her, looking into her eyes as they stared through him. "You can't have been more than thirteen. The UEG and their puppet the UNSC did that to you. Took you away from your family and made you into their slave. Why the fuck are you loyal to these…" He was spitting now, visibly furious "… Monsters?"

Their eyes met for a long pause, and he sighed exasperatedly and stood back up, moving back over to the table. "If you don't start telling me something, I'm gonna start hurting you. I won't enjoy it. But you aren't leaving here to go back to your Imperialist Fascist government. You either come round to our way of thinking, or you don't leave at all." He looked at her and shrugged, all trace of emotion now absent from his face. "Which is a shame, because we need someone with technical knowledge of these suits of yours. A couple of our techs are looking at your helmets now. Thing's built like a brick shit house and harder to crack than a Guthtar egg."

She pondered his words for a second. He was drip feeding her information, hoping that her pride and impetuousness would lead her to come up with some of retort and let slip some small information on the helmet systems or anything else that could be useful. She said nothing. She felt nothing.

"So you're not going to fall for Psychology 101. Fair enough, they told me you'd be a tough nut to crack." The man leaned up against the wall with his arms crossed, smirking knowingly. "I can fairly confidently say that you're not going to fall for Torture 101 either. No, you Spartans are too tough for all that macho fingernail-pulling shot that you see in the movies." He nodded "Fair enough. But, we know more than you think about you Spartans. Before three years ago, not a whisper of freaks in full power armour gunning up schools and mining bases, but ever since the covenant showed up, you guys keep popping up, sometimes to valiantly defend an outer colony, but also to put down anyone who doesn't agree with a militaristic oppression of their people." His face fell into a scowl. "My brother was one of those people. He fought for independence from the UEG, from the government that started this war with alien empires. And you killed him."

 _Great, I get to deal with the grieving family member brand of psychopath_ she thought to herself, wondering which fireteam had been behind the brother's death.

"I would do anything to talk to my brother one more time. He was my family. And we've been following your little crew's progress for the last 18 months. I seems you three have been busy. Reports from all over the colonies of Spartans with your three's numbers on the armour. 170, 209 and 211. So we know you guys operate together. I bet you would tell me anything to ensure their safety? Unless you'd like for us to rip all his fingers off?"

Her heart raced. They were talking about Jake. She didn't know where he was. Probably in another small bare room in the complex, being questioned by another Innie.

"Now this all sounds like a bit of macho 'I'm gonna hurt you really bad' bullshit, completely baseless, designed to make you sing your little heart out. So to show you how serious we are, I'm going to go into his cell and get some payback. The tech you mauled will probably lose that finger. Let's see if you're as feisty when you know that your actions have consequences." His face slipped back into a spiteful menacing leer, and she was deeply disturbed by how fluidly this psychopath transitioned between unbridled fury and calm coolness. He was more deranged than she had thought.

When he left, her room fell into an eerie silence. The only sound was the faint buzzing of the light bulb above her and a deeper humming resonating throughout the walls all around, doubtless due to the complex's power generator. There wasn't an electrical grid this far out of Plume's major tourist cities. Beyond the modern steel-and-glass skyscraping hotels and resort complexes a little further out from the metropolis, the entire planet was undeveloped, thick forests and roaming plains. And here, 300km from the nearest inhabited settlement, the Plume anti-Imperialist Front had set up shop. She hadn't been able to see much of the above-ground facilities when they brought her in, thanks to the thick bag that had been roughly dragged over her head as they had carried her immobilised body in. It had given her no small sense of satisfaction to hear the groans of the men forced to drag her down several flights of stairs. Hauling around 350kg of Spartan was quite the workout

Blue team really were taking their sweet time. As soon as the three members of Vanguard had been busted, their location betrayed by a Navy Intelligence officer double-agent (who hopefully would be locked up in an ONI cesspool for the rest of his days), Jake had sent out an alert on all NavSpecWar channels. They hadn't wanted to surrender, but the Innies had managed to get their hands on a UH17-Jackdaw VTOL aircraft. The vehicle was ancient by UNSC standards, it wouldn't take much ordinance to take it down, but the ageing gunship's utility was not in ruggedness or combat effectiveness, but in its (for the time of its design) advanced stealth capabilities. The radar-minimising coating coupled with the whisper-quiet rotor blades had allowed it to approach their position without detection and force them to surrender. And unfortunately for Vanguard, the stolen Anvil-V air-to-ground missiles had been enough to put them in an untenable position. Blue team had been deployed to Plume's second moon to disrupt insurrectionist operations on a UNSC mining outpost. So as Vanguard had felt the unsettling paralysis of the neural inhibition collars, the other Spartans should have dropped everything and helped. 13 hours later, and they were overdue.

It wasn't long before the man was back, his face gilded in a fresh sheen of sweat, clutching a cloth bundle in one hand and a pair of bloody bolt cutters in the other. He was panting and manic, and wasted no time in revealing the gruesome sight inside the oily rag; a pair of human fingers, severed at the base. She didn't have to ask if they were really those of her teammate, she could tell from the deep linear scars along the digit, acquired as part of the Spartans' extensive biomechanical and chemical augmentations. The authenticity of the gruesome sight was confirmed in her mind when she spotted the thin slivers of dark grey metal entwined with the shocking white bone sticking out of the body parts' cross-sections.

Her stomach rose into her throat as the gory package was thrust into her face, but she did not flinch. She wouldn't give this piece of filth the satisfaction.

"I gotta say, you Spartans are cold-blooded. He didn't even whimper when I got to the bone. Had to get the circular saw out to cut through this damn metal shit. Look at that, you're barely even human." He grinned coldly as he threw the amputated digits onto the table by the door and threw the bent bolt cutters to the concrete floor. The clattering took a while to die down in the echo-chamber, and each reverberation drew a hot white fury into her mind. He had hurt her family. The man was as good as dead.

He left the room briefly to drag a chair into it, and sat down in front of her, lazily wiping the bright crimson blood off of his hands, smiling as happily as a child using finger paints. "So you see that we will go to pretty extreme measures to find out what we want. So, if you don't play nice, next we'll move onto the other hand, does that sound good?"

She smiled as her enhanced sense of hearing picked up the faintest scuffle echoing through the underground corridors of the complex. Now normally this might be attributable to a guard dropping his weapon by mistake, or maybe a small rodent-like marsupial native to the colony running through the compound having snuck in. But she knew that this time, the explanation would be far more deadly.

"Oh, now you're smiling?" He grinned back, no trace of humour in his voice. "Are you going to play nice?"

"The one thing you should know about Spartans." She said, listening intently to the almost non-existent sounds of footsteps outside the door as they crept nearer. "Is that we don't play games. Instead, we put people like you in the ground"

He snorted derisively "And you have a sense of humour too!" His cheek twitched "I don't know if they teach you this in between all the war-mongering classes and baby-killing lessons, but it's kind of hard to do anything when you're a vegetable." He taunted, checking his comm-pad as it buzzed in his pocket.

"I'm not the one who's doing anything." She stated, savouring the dramatic tension she hoped her words caused. "She will."

Right on cue, the door to the room seemed to fly directly at the interrogator's back, propelled into him by a power armour-assisted kick. The force of the blow put the target into a daze and slammed his limp body into her, knocking her off of the chair and onto the ground. With the ability to stop her fall with her hands removed, the fall hurt. She felt her nose start to bleed as surprisingly gentle hands turned her over, and she found herself staring into the gold-mirrorred faceplate of Kelly-087.

"How rude of me, I didn't knock first" She said in an English-accented voice as she reached down and undid the inhibitor collar. Control of her limbs flooded back to her like a long-lost friend. Kelly stood back as she stood up, a little shakily at first, and cricked her neck, taking a brief second to scratch the itches that had been bothering her for hours. "Here, there are a few of them we bypassed up top to get down here, they may not be thrilled with us."

She gratefully took the loaded M6D pistol from her, already feeling a thousand times better with a weapon in her hand. "Where are the others?"

"Getting Sara and Jake. I drew the short straw and got you. Hope you enjoyed your stay" Her voice was teasing slightly, and she knew instantly that none of the other Spartans would let Vanguard team forget about this. "Let's go, we need to find your gear and bug out." She started towards the doorway, but froze in place as she spotted the grizzly sight on the table. Kelly spun around.

"They're Jake's." She said softly, answering her unasked question. "Bag them up, you know we can't leave anything behind."

With some reluctance, Kelly did wrap the severed digits up and tuck them in a compartment on her armour, and from her body language she could tell that she was as furious as she was. She grasped her pistol tightly and was about to exit the room ahead of Kelly, but a faint moaning brought her attention back to the man behind her less-than-stellar treatment over the last few hours.

She moved over to him, channelling all the rage and pain she'd felt over the last few hours as she ripped the remnants of the door off of the man's broken back and threw it across the room where it shattered into a thousand pieces. She kicked him over onto his back and squatted down next to his head, his eyes wide open and fearful.

"I want you to know that I'm not going to kill you because of any loyalty I have towards the UEG or the UNSC. I'm not going to do it because I'm a slave to the orders of my commanding officers, in fact, I'm pretty sure that they would like to interrogate you, try and make _you_ 'play nice'. I'm not even doing it because I hate the Insurrectionist movement. I'm a colony girl myself, I even got to watch it burn too." She paused, placing the barrel of the pistol square in the centre of the trembling man's bald forehead. "I'm going to kill you because you hurt my family. The rest is just icing on the cake."

His eyes were wide and terrified, flashes of pain contorting his features as he tried to move, the broken bones in his spine and legs grating together in protest.

She pulled the trigger and instantly felt a deluge of pain, anger, shame and disgust flood her mind. She stood up shakily and moved past Kelly into the corridor. "Thanks, Rabbit." She said as she passed the other Spartan, using her rather fitting nickname which referred to her incredible speed.

"Don't mention it." She muttered, staring back at the mess she'd made.

It didn't take them long to find the others and fight their way out of the base. It all melded together as her training and instinct took over. She secured her helmet from the Ops room of the complex, along with her assault rifle and gauntlets, and then joined the rest of the Spartans in burning the complex down to the ground. The insect-like Jackdaw had tried to take off, but was quickly brought down by a well-placed armour-piercing round through the cockpit canopy by Linda. Pilotless, the helicopter span wildly, out of control and buried itself in the armoury of the base, setting off a chain reaction of explosions that gutted the building and set it ablaze. The installation's computer servers were destroyed by C12 explosive, the insurrectionist fighters eliminated by fast and accurate rifle fire from all sides as they struggled to respond to the unknown surprise attack. The lab techs who had worked on dismantling the Spartans' armour and injected them with truth serum were cut down by Sara from the roof with her sniper rifle as they fled into the woods around the base. She felt no sympathy for them, they knew what they were doing messing with them. The only sympathy she felt was for Jake, who was fighting just as hard as the rest of them, but with a bandage hastily fixed to his crippled hand, slowly seeping through with blood. She was responsible for that. She would forever be reminded of how her anger had caused hurt to him.

Eventually the complex fell silent, and the Spartans grouped up on the landing pad while they waited for the Pelican Dropship to extract them. All of them wore identical Mjolnir Mark IV armour, and only someone who knew each one of them intimately could tell who was who. She knew them all, Jacob, Sara, Kelly, John, Fred, and Linda. The Insurrectionists hadn't gone down without a fight, evidenced by the dents and cracks in assorted armour panels; Fred had taken some sort of high calibre round to the shoulder, and was rolling his arm to test for damage, Sara was sporting a cracked faceplate where shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade had caught her.

As they were waiting, a yellow IFF tag popped into existence on her motion tracker, away from the helipad. She buzzed Teamcom and crouched, indicating the direction. The rest of the team responded fluidly, dropping to a low stance and advancing on the target, fanning out to providing overlapping fields of fire. The contact was close, down the side of one of the base's buildings, it looked like it was coming from the garbage bin.

Fred moved up on her left, Jake on her right and ripped the lid off of the container while she thrust the barrel of her pistol into whoever was in there's face. In the light of three helmet's worth of high intensity beams, the dark grey uniform of the traitorous Navy Intel officer shone with garbage, stained by leftover food and drink. He was quivering amongst the bags of refuse, glasses cracked and askew.

"Please don't kill me!" He screamed, his hands in front of his face as if to protect from .50 calibre rounds.

"You're going to wish we had" She growled as she hauled the man out of the trash with one hand, the other Spartans keeping their weapons trained on him. She proceeded to search him roughly, finally removing the comms unit which had dialled an unknown number seconds before. The device turning on had activated the motion tracker contact. Idiot. If he'd waited 20 minutes to call for help he would've got off scott free.

They returned to the landing pad as the jet-black Pelican made its final approach, the debris and dust being whipped around by the thrusters. The prisoner was wearing a look of utter shock on his face, staring at the Spartans like he was looking at God himself.

"There were only supposed to be three of you" He half-mumbled to himself, the realisation of his fate finally dawning. She smiled behind the visor. Navy Intelligence was highly compartmentalised, so although the sailor had been assigned to their half of the anti-Insurrectionist operation on Plume, he had been completely unaware of the others.

"You play with fire…" She responded, letting the rest of the colloquialism hang over him. She glanced over at Jake, and he gave her an intentionally exaggerated thumbs up with his mauled hand. That one gesture was enough to ensure her that it was all going to be okay. Even when tortured, Jacob-209 still had a sense of humour. They had all escaped largely unharmed, they had disrupted Insurrectionist activity, and had a lovely prisoner for ONI to tear into. So it was with a muted smile that Sabina-211 sat in a crew seat opposite Jake and Sara as their dropship peeled away from the earth and disappeared into the moons-lit night.


	3. Reunion

**Chief Petty Officer /:ERROR:NAME REDACTED:\\\, Duna City, Loren, Akba System, 2555, 09:12 Local Time.**

Maybe they wouldn't open the door. Maybe he could walk away and not have to face this. Why was this so difficult? He was a Spartan for God's sake. He'd served on every front of the brutal Human-Covenant war for close to 30 years, killed countless thousands of alien aggressors, slain Hunters, Brutes, Elites and Grunts alike. He'd seen colonies burn under the cleansing beams of advanced warships, watched as Reach fell, and helped halt the invasion of humanity's homeworld Earth. He had done all this and more, and yet here he was, terrified to his core of whatever was on the other side of that door.

He nervously straightened his perfectly pressed and brilliant white UNSCN dress uniform, complete with colourful ribbon bars and a smattering of medals pinned to his chest. His shoulder epaulettes showed the proud bars of his rank emblazoned gold on black, and his white peaked cap's golden metal furniture gleamed in the morning light streaming through the hallway's window overlooking Duna City. He looked like a model in the Navy's Dress Uniform Handbook, every detail immaculately presented. He knew, because he'd been up since 3:00 AM hand polishing every furnishing. He was still on Zulu time, the 24-hour day-night cycle of Earth. Back in Sydney, it was dinner time.

Would he even recognise him?

The sharp rapport of his knuckles on the front door to Apartment 17 broke the silence as he knocked again, half hoping that the intel he'd been given was inaccurate. Years after the War had ended, the UEG's Census records were still patchy; so many people had disappeared and then resurfaced years later, many hundreds of thousands of people were still unaccounted for, and more still were living on so called "Rogue Colonies" like Venezia and Firenze, those whose municipal governments had declared independence from the UNSC and cut of all communication, even going so far as to open fire on UNSC warships attempting to dock.

But here on Loren, the records were more accurate than most, and those records said that one Lawrence Frye lived at number 17 at Green Hills Plaza in the industrial Duna City. Frye wasn't his real last name; he had changed it when his home colony was glassed in 2539 for reasons unknown to anyone but Lawrence.

Noises. The thuds of bare feet on wood, the mumbling of a male voice on the other side of the door. His heart raced in his chest, and he cleared his throat anxiously.

The door opened slowly, and a middle-aged man's face with morning stubble dotted around his square jaw poked into the gap, yawning and blinking sleep out of his eyes. Those eyes. Stormy blue, just like his. And their father's.

"Can I help you?" He mumbled, looking him up and down quickly.

"L-lawrence Frye?" He stuttered.

"Yeah, why?" He looked suspicious now, eyes narrowed slightly.

"I'm with the Navy, I have information that may be of value to you, are you a previous resident of Bothe?"

"I was, up until the bastards glassed it 6 years ago" He nodded towards his uniform "Not that you guys lifted a finger to try and stop it."

"We did what we could." He said, hoping to dispel that sentiment early on. The man squinted slightly, opening the door more to get a better view of him, and he got a good view of the inside of the foyer; brightly coloured children's coats hung up on hooks by the door, and his mind yearned for something he'd never had at the sight. "As I said, I have important information that may be of value to you, may I come in?"

"I know you from somewhere." Lawrence interrupted, tilting his head to one side slightly. "Did you come to Sam's school or something last year for Colonies Day?"

"No. We have met before, and that's what I'd like to discus, can I come in?." He answered

Frye frowned slightly as if he'd thought of something that left a bad taste in his mouth. He watched as the horrible realisatio dawned on Frye's face, his face froze, blood drained out of his face. He stumbled back, knocking over an umbrella stand with a loud crash. His eyes were wide and shocked. "But… That's not right…"

He rushed to answer the maelstrom of questions that must be coursing through the man's mind. "That wasn't me. That was a flash clone designed to take my place while I was conscripted into-"

"Woah woah woah" Lawrence shook his head, frowning "Flash clone? Conscription? What the fuck are you on about? You can't be him. I watched him die right in front of me. This is some sick fucking joke pal, only I'm not laughing."

"I know it must be hard to believe, but I'm him." He'd rehearsed what he would say so many times, but now when it came down to it, he was struggling to find the words. "You know the Master Chief? The Spartans?"

"Yeah, the big dudes in scary power armour, what about them?"

"I'm one of them. I'm a Spartan." He said calmly.

Lawrence exhaled sharply, his face a kaleidoscopic mixture of anger, confusion and disbelief. "You're a Spartan? I'm supposed to believe that some random guy who happens to look just like my…" Frye's words caught in the back of his throat. He shook his head and opened the door fully, revealing him to be wearing just a pair of boxers and a shirt. The man led the Spartan through the open-plan kitchen/living room to a black leather couch in front of a coffee table. The entire space was tastefully decorated, or rather it would be if it weren't for the children's clothes, toys and books strewn all over the place. He had to make a space on the couch to sit down, and still managed to get a small Master Chief action figure jammed in his thigh.

The floor creaked and groaned as Lawrence dragged a wooden chair over from the kitchen area and sat in it opposite him, staring at him all the while. They sat there in silence for a few seconds.

"Why aren't you dead?"

He cleared his throat. He'd practised this speech a hundred times in his head on the shuttle ride over here. "The 6-year old boy who died of multiple organ system failure was not your brother. He wasn't me. It was a clone of me with flash-copied memories designed to replace me." He paused, letting his brother digest the information. He frowned again and rubbed his forehead.

"So then why did he die? Where did you go? Who took you? I don't…" He trailed off, shaking his head again and sighing. "Please, continue. Tell me everything."

"I was taken to a UNSC training camp on Reach and trained from the age of 6 to become a new breed of soldiers, a Spartan. I, along with 30 or so others. As for why the clone died. They were never designed to last." The last sentence left a bitter taste on his tongue. Of all the despicable practices ONI had used during the Spartan-II programme, this one seemed the most egregiously unnecessary and cruel.

"They kidnapped you? When did…" a look of realisation dawned over his face "The day after Mum's birthday. You got lost in the woods on the way home from Alex's. We looked for you for hours and found you under a tree asleep. That was when they took you?"

He nodded "Yes. I was trained and prepared to be a Spartan. I was taught to fight, trained to be the best I could be. And I was. I fought the covenant for 30 years. Me and the others, we saved humanity."

Lawrence shuffled uncomfortably "You sound like the propaganda vids on waypoint. But then I suppose you are the propaganda."

"I suppose so. Most of the Spartan programme is set to be declassified by ONI this year, so they let the participants access their files and find any surviving family members to let them know. There are going to be a lot of families from the colonies who lost a child in that timeframe who are going to be looking for their kid in the Spartan ranks." He was rambling and he knew it. But he didn't know how this felt. Finally finding his only surviving family that he barely remembered from before he was conscripted. And yet, he felt oddly awkward with this stranger that he'd known for a total of 10 minutes.

"'Participants'?" He growled "Let's call it what it is, you were child soldiers. UNSC sanctioned child soldiers." He got up and started to pace the room, not making eye contact with him. "How can you sit there so calm, does what happened to our parents mean nothing to you? Mum went mad with grief and Dad turned to the bottle. Grandma had to raise me until I was of age." He glowered at him, fists clenched "The people you work for, the UNSC, ONI, hell the UEG for all I know, sanctioned this. Tore you away from your family and destroyed what was left of it."

He struggled to find words "You have to understand; I don't really remember what life was like before I entered the programme. The training was intense, and we were taught so much in such a short time. Eventually life before faded into a blur. I still remembered you and the cat. But mum and dad sort of faded." He repressed a gasp, not realising how emotionally charged this topic was.

"You were brainwashed." He spoke with fresh horror "They rip you out of your life and spoon-feed you a bunch of shit about defending Earth to justify the atrocities they've committed."

"We were special. Genetically superior to most humans. We had to." He blinked "I wanted to serve."

"You were 6 years old. You didn't know how to consent to these things." He cupped his head in his hands. "And what are those scars from?"

He outstretched his hands, revealing the harsh scarring running down the length of his fingers. "Surgical augmentations. It's necessary so we can wear the armour without shattering our own bones. Reinforced skeletal structure, enhanced muscle density, more acute vision, faster reflexes. We became what humanity needed us to be."

"So they weren't content with just abducting you, they had to rip you apart and put you back together again." He whispered in stunned silence. "These people are monsters." He paused "Why are you telling me all this?"

"Because you deserve the truth" He answered after a pause.

"Because I deserve the truth." Lawrence parroted. "You know what I deserve? I deserve a family that didn't spiral into shit at age 8. I deserve a brother who isn't a Frankensteinian monster built to kill. I deserve to not have crippling PTSD stemming from coming home to find my mum's brains splattered all across your bedroom wall." He was red with rage at this point, but made a point to keep his voice down.

"I didn't want any of this. I didn't choose this life. But I'm thankful to have made a difference." He said, unsure of himself.

"Jesus Christ, listen to yourself!" Lawrence stared, incredulous "You're drinking the fucking Kool-Aid. Have you seen the coroner's report of her death?"

He nodded, stomach cold and uncomfortable.

"Good, then you'll know that on the night that she killed herself, exactly one year after you, or whatever the hell they replaced you with, choked to death on its own blood in Edwards' Children's centre, she took Dad's .44 magnum and blew her brains out while standing at the foot of your bed."

The Spartan remembered the photographs. The investigators had taken enough of them to digitally reconstruct the room in holographic form. He had used one of the _Renovatio_ 's simulation pods to recreate the cramped bedroom. The gun was found clasped in her left hand, one round missing from the magazine, later found embedded in the drywall in the attic, still with traces of blood engraved in its surface. He didn't look at the woman- his mother's body too much during his reconstruction. It was too painful. It was a sight he would never forget as a battle-hardened veteran of three decades. He couldn't even imagine what it would do to a frightened 8-year-old.

"That is what your superiors did. They did this. They drove a happy mother of two to suicide and a father to drink. He died 20 years ago. And you weren't there. Why weren't you there? You didn't give a shit about us, or they pumped you full of patriotism and drugs to make you forget."

"We weren't allowed to contact any family, we had to train, to fight. We-" He started to explain, his own recollection of that time in his life hazy.

"I bet you didn't even try did you? You were so up yourself about your new family of super-freaks that you didn't give a rat's ass about who you left behind." The man in front of him was not the sleepy father of one who'd answered the door minutes before. His eyes were ablaze with repressed emotion, fists clenched tightly as he paced rapidly, snorting like a bull, looking like he wanted to break something. He looked over at the Spartan and saw the guilt etched into his face. "I knew it. You didn't even try. And now you turn up, 30 years later with a shiny white uniform and a social call."

"I'm sorry" He said genuinely "I tried. When Bothe was glassed I looked in the records for you and mum and dad. I couldn't find you. Then it was on to the next mission. And the next and the next. I spent so many years fighting. I've lost people. Too many. So I know what you're feeling about mum. That sense of hopelessness, of guilt and responsibility. "

Frye relented, taking a few deep breaths before sitting down slowly in his chair, rubbing an ache in his thigh "So, how did you think this would happen? You'd walk in, say 'hey big bro, I've secretly been alive for 30 years, but now I'm back! Wanna grab a beer?'?"

"Spartans can't drink. The alcohol gets metabolised too quickly." He stated awkwardly "And no. I get why you're angry. I'm angry too. But I was given a unique chance to help humanity. Was there a cost? Yes. Do some aspects of the process seem unnecessary and cruel? Yes. And the people responsible will pay one way or another. I am not one of those people." He thought for a second about his next statement, whether or not he really believed his words "I am not a victim either. I could have left. It's almost impossible, but it's been done by two Spartans that I know of. But I chose to stay."

There was a long silence after that.

"Why are you even here?" Frye said, looking frustrated and unusually tired for a man who'd freshly woken up.

"I'm here to say I'm sorry. For everything that happened, to you, to mum, to dad. Everything. To let you know the truth, and to try to make amends."

Lawrence walked over to the fridge and grabbed carton of orange juice, pouring a glass and downing it in one. "I know all of this isn't your fault, but I've worked hard in my life to get over the past. To put it all behind me and work forward. For my family." He looked up, eyes mournful "So thank you for telling me the truth. But this is painful. I don't know if I can process this and come to terms with it. So until I do, I think it best if you leave."

He choked back his emotions. "Of course." His throat was hoarse when he cleared it, standing up and straightening his uniform. "I'll go now. I just thought you should know. In case you ever feel differently, there'll be a message in your Waypoint inbox with a way to get in contact." He made to walk out of the room, but he turned around and addressed his brother one last time as he reached into an inner pocket of his Jacket and pulled out an envelope. "Spartans don't really get pay checks, but this is enough credits to put Sam through college. Do what you want with it, burn it, blow it on stims or women or cars. I don't expect anything back. It's my way of saying that I'm sorry that I never got to know you."

Lawrence stared him down for a moment, then nodded curtly, looking away out of the window. "Thank you. And I'm sorry for what they did to you."

He placed the envelope gently down on the kitchen and turned away to leave, but found a young curly-haired boy staring up at him in awe. How the child had managed to creep up on him was beyond him, regardless there he was, wearing RallyHog pyjamas and rubbing his eyes.

"Daddy, who's he?" The boy asked with childlike innocence.

"He's-" Lawrence faltered, so he took up the slack.

"I'm an old friend of your Dad's, so you must be Sam right?"

Sam nodded "That's me"

He crouched down in front of him, talking with him eye-to-eye "Sam. Good name. I used to have a friend called Sam. He was the bravest person I ever met. Are you brave?"

The boy smiled and nodded, showing off a gap-toothed grin. "Nobody scares me!"

The Spartan grinned back "That's the spirit. You feel up for a job?" He continued when Sam nodded happily "Can you look after your Dad? Be good comb your hair, brush your teeth. Do you think you can manage that?"

"Yes sir!" The 10-year-old saluted, playing soldier.

He smiled sadly "Good lad" He reached up and pulled off the smart white cap from his head and rested it gently on the boy's head. It was comically oversized for him, but he grinned ear to ear as it fell forward and covered his eyes. In that moment, he thought he understood Lawrence's point of view more than if he'd argued for a thousand hours with him. With this new understanding, he knew that he would never get the fairy-tale reunion that he'd secretly dreamed off in the back of his mind for all of these years. It was too far gone for that. However, maybe he could do some good. But for that his brother needed time. He'd had 30 years to come to terms with this, Lawrence had had all of 30 minutes.

He stood up and nodded at his brother, then walked out of the apartment, down the stairs and out into the bright morning sunlight. He had another 16 hours of shore leave before he had to return to the ship, but he didn't feel like hanging around. Too many wounds had been reopened, and he needed to keep busy to cope. Maybe he'd run a few training exercises for the Spartans aboard. Maybe he'd train solo, or just hit the gym for a while. What was done is done. He couldn't change the past, or the hurt that came with it. But Jacob-209 could change the future. And with a little bit of weight lifted from his shoulders, the future was looking a little brighter. Until then, well, there were always more wars to fight.


	4. Retalliation

**Petty Officer 1** **st** **Class /:ERROR:NAME REDACTED:\\\, UNSC** _ **Recluse**_ **, In orbit of Eirene, Mali system, 2554**

They were all dead. She couldn't help them. At least most of them had been dead by the time the room's atmosphere had been ripped out of their lungs and sucked out of the ragged gash in the window in front of her. In a way they had been lucky. A plasma bolt to the head hurt a hell of a lot less than exposure to hard vacuum. She knew, because her and every single Spartan of Gama company had been repeatedly exposed to vacuum as part of their training. The problem with most peoples' reactions is that instinctively humans tend to inhale and hold their breath when in a situation where it is important, diving into water, when shocked etc. This isn't helpful in vacuum. Because the vast pressure differential between the inside of your lungs and the outside world means that that breath full of oxygen is coming out of you, one way or another. The "another" part of it was significantly more damaging. So proper procedure it to exhale hard. You have to do the very thing that your instincts are screaming at you not to do.

However, for most of the dozen or so ensigns drifting around the compartment, the strafing runs from the Seraph fighter had killed them before the atmosphere systems had failed and released the precious air from the multiple holes in the polymer window.

Fortunately for her, her training would not be necessary in this particular situation. Her armour's readouts showed she still had 58 minutes of breathable air available. Good. Good. She was struggling not to panic in these circumstances, and looked around the room for a full 30 seconds before trying to move out of the cargo bay.

The room around her was small, and dark. The only light came from her bright halogen lamps on her helmet and from the stars slowly rotating through the shattered view screen on one wall as the ship tumbled, powerless through the space between Eirene and its moon Tero. The planet below had been glassed back in 2529, only 5 years into the galaxy-wide Human-Covenant war, its surface reduced to a dull grey glass-like substance by the incredible heat of Covenant plasma weaponry and energy projectors. 20 million people had lived on Eirene before the war, now around 12 thousand miners were camped down on the hellish surface, chipping away at the glass and trying to re-colonise. It was thanks to them that the Relic had been uncovered in a previously undiscovered Forerunner outpost hidden under a granite sheet that had been reduced to vitreous solids and unsealed by the Liang-Dortmund corporation as part of their mining efforts.

She patted her thigh to check that the small microfiber bag containing the Artefact was still attached to her armour. The Artefact itself was about 6 inches long, made of a weirdly light-absorbing matte-grey metal hewn into an almost perfect cylinder, with glyphs etched in light onto one end. For all she and anyone at ONI knew, this Artefact, pulled from the core console at the centre of the outpost, could be a valuable Forerunner asset with clues as to other installations, or it could be a paperweight. She didn't care. Her job was to get it back to Earth ASAP. And things had been going swimmingly until the local Covenant drongos had picked up chatter of their retrieval, probably from the scavenging community of Kig-yar camped down on the planet's surface, scrounging for titanium.

And so they had come. The DAV-class stealth corvette had chased them down as they had approached the slip-space exit beacon and attacked, raking the small corvette from bow to stern with lasers and gutting their engines with plasma torpedo, leaving them drifting. They had sent out a distress call, but the nearest UNSC force that could help was on the planet's surface with no way to get to her. Brilliant.

Her musings were cut short by flickering blue light on the walls around her. She glanced to her right and saw that the door from the cargo bay into the engineering deck, which had automatically sealed when atmospheric integrity was lost in this sector, was now being cut through. A bright blue bead of light traced around the periphery, too intensely bright to look at directly, even with her polarised filters activated, which left a glowing red trail as the plasma cutter melted through the triple-thickness titanium door. They would be through and into the room within 20 seconds. They wouldn't make it.

She confirmed the detonation code with a blink of her eyes and her HUD flashed a warning as the signal was sent. A short three second countdown timer started, during which she double-checked that her M20 sub machine gun was ready to go. Satisfied, she tensed her legs and got ready to push off along the wall with the door in it.

Ahead of her, a bloom of pure white seared her retinas as the make-shift breaching charge detonated, blowing the weakened door into the next room and hopefully crushing any Covenant on the other side. The explosion was fleeting in the vacuum, and there was no sound as she pushed off from the wall with her legs and sailed towards the ragged hole, effortlessly recalling the countless hours of zero-gravity training as she steadied herself with one outstretched hand grabbing hold of the utility rail next to the portal, the other hand squeezing the trigger on her weapon as a squat pug-faced alien peeked through the doorway.

The grunt twitched and tumbled backwards as the armour-piercing rounds tore through the atmospheric armour suit and punctured the pyramidal methane tank on its back. Its fellows panicked and fired blindly through the doorway, green bolts of plasma pouring through bay. She was already clear of the fire having pulled herself away from the edge and into cover. A few select bursts of automatic fire later and the enemy search team was floating down the corridor in a glistening combination of bright blue blood and wispy methane vapour.

Her motion tracker clear, she pulled herself through the door and into the corridor towards the engineering section, activating her helmet-mounted flashlights to light the way. Not even the emergency lighting was active, which did not bode well for her half-thought-out plan for getting the hell out of this FUBAR situation. First on her list was getting some semblance of power back online. This was vitally important for the second part of her plan, which was vitally important to the third. If she failed at any of them, she was most likely dead. The Covenant would keep throwing bodies at her until she ran out of ammo, or they would back off and wait for her to run out of oxygen. Not great options.

"Alright, let's see what I can do" She mumbled to herself as she floated through the plasma-cut hole in the opposite end of the corridor and into the pitch-black engineering bay. The place was a haunting diorama, the three engineers who had been working in the cramped room were suspended in the air, globules of blood trailing behind them as they spun through the not-air. Tools and datapads hung in the space around them, their screens still glowing with light and casting faint macabre shadows on the floor and walls as they spun. The other door out of the central compartment had been cut through by the aliens, evidenced by the still-glowing rough 1-metre-wide hole in its titanium surface. She didn't have much time. Reinforcements would probably already be on their way to avenge the dead Unggoy, and now she had lost the element of surprise.

She inspected the panels on the wall, noting that what little emergency power was left kept the screens dimly lit. She typed in commands into the reactor control system, assessing the damage done to both the primary fusion drive and the backup fission unit. She swore under her breath, the primary drive was toast. The containment shield around the core had done its job and prevented complete meltdown, but there was no way to re-connect the ships grid with the core, save by a UNSC Engineering station. The backup power plant was damaged as well, having taken some sort of damage in the battle, but was still producing some power. There was nothing she could do about the lack of air, the ship had been too extensively holed to support an atmosphere. The routing system must be shot as well, because what little power was being produced was being used by completely the wrong systems. For instance, the coffee machine and vending units in the mess hall didn't need power when the artificial gravity was dead. That wasn't all, completely redundant systems were being flooded with power while basic life support and door control were offline. Whatever dumb AI was in charge of this had lost their mind.

She rapidly keyed in commands, cutting off all power to extraneous systems and funnelling everything she could into door power and artificial gravity. It wasn't easy, it took multiple inputs of her level-1 clearance code for the terminal to accept her inputs. As her body was slowly pulled towards the floor of the compartment, she synchronised the command and control systems of the corvette to her HUD. She was going to need the edge.

The next group of Grunts fared as well as the first. Their wild bursts of plasma hastily fired needles barely slowed down in her mad dash towards the ship's weapons bay. Time was of the essence.

That was when the Elite ruined her day.

The alien had to have been using the infamous active camouflage ability to mask his silhouette, blending in with the dull grey bulkhead of the corridor leading up to weapons. By the time she'd recognised the tell-tale shimmering, the Sangheili had already brought his rifle up to bear, aiming the long-barrelled weapon straight at her.

Her leg was ripped from under her as the beam round struck her in the knee, flaring her shields and breaking them, tearing through her armour's ceramic layers before dissipating mid-way through the gel layer. Of course, she had no idea as to the specifics. She just knew that it hurt.

Mid way through her impromptu roll she had been thrown into, she turned off the artificial gravity. This abrupt change caused the pair to float into the air, her still headed towards him thanks to her momentum, and had the intended effect of throwing off the elite's follow-up shot, which instead burned through the ceiling of the hall as he flailed his arms trying to right himself.

She too advantage of his momentary loss of control by reaching out an arm to stabilise her chaotic rotation and opening fire with her SMG in the other hand. The automatic spray was almost entirely silent, she could still hear a muted roar interspersed with metallic clunks and clicks as the vibrations travelled up her suit and into the air inside her helmet. The force from the assault slowed her speed as she fired, allowing her more time on target as the rounds pummelled the alien's energy shielding and depleted it, puncturing the sleek vacuum suit and tearing into flesh. He twitched and thrashed like a fly caught in a web as armour-piercing bullets ripped through him, sending spurts of deep rich blue blood drifting through the hall as he became motionless, slowly drifting down the hall thanks to the momentum imparted from the M20's 60-round magazine.

As the gravity pulled her down to earth she gasped as white hot searing agony pulsed from her injured limb. She collapsed to the floor as her left leg buckled, the SMG clattered out of her hand and across the floor as she breathed heavily, wincing. For now the pain was muted, but as soon as her adrenaline wore off she knew that she'd need meds. By the time it got to that however, hopefully she would be far from this wreck

As far as her suit diagnostics could tell her, the beam rifle energy had not actually broken through all layers of her suit, and had superheated the gel layer causing third degree burns around her left knee. This meant she was still barely vacuum-proof. At least for now. But she couldn't take any more hits. How had she not seen the camouflaged alien lying in wait for her? She cursed herself out while struggling to her feet, testing her range of motion and supressing the fresh throbbing pain.

She hobbled into the weapons room, stumbling over to a terminal and accessing it, trying to activate security cameras across the ship to get a better picture of the force she was facing. Judging from the number of enemies she'd encountered so far, she could reasonably conclude that whatever boarding craft was latched on to the corvette, it would be a larger type. In her head she ran through the known classes of covenant boarding craft, narrowing it down to two options, then selecting the bigger of the two to estimate the worst scenario as to enemy numbers. She was in trouble.

The camera displays burst into life on-screen, showing multiple squads of Sangheili-led infantry in the mess hall and lifeboat bays, mostly Unggoy but a few Kig-Yar scatter amongst them. She was shocked. Most of the Kig-yar had broken away from whatever pre-Schism faction they were associated. The bird-like alien species were legendary for their pirate origins amongst the covenant's many species, and they tended to be less fanatical believers in the Great Journey than the other races. Their presence could mean that the post-war covenant remnant were less fractured than the Office of Naval Intelligence believed them to be.

Tearing her eyes away from the screen, she limped over to the wall behind her, which was indented with 5 square lockers each with a number pad lock and display screen on them. Inside each of these lockers was a HAVOC nuclear warhead. The lockers themselves were made of a top-secret titanium-A alloy which was nigh unbreakable. This ship could fall from orbit, which it would very likely do soon, burn up in the atmosphere and these lockers would be sitting in the centre of the crater unharmed. She didn't need all five.

As a Spartan, her authorisation code granted her access immediately, and the door swung open to reveal a black round ball with a control panel, no bigger than a basketball. She affixed it to the magnetic holster in the small of her back and returned to the camera feed, analysing what route she would have to take to get to the escape pods. Unfortunately for her the only real route was straight through the mess hall where a large number of aliens had congregated, all listening to a white-armoured Sangheili. There were easily 50 of them. She didn't fancy those odds, even if she wasn't injured. She couldn't take them all. It was suicide.

2 minutes later she strode out of the room and retrieved her discarded SMG, heading in the complete opposite direction of the mess hall. Each door she passed through she locked, hoping to slow the enemy advance through the ship after her. It might not be enough, but she was counting on the enemy taking the time to break through the now 4 double-thickness doors in between them and her. She was also counting on them not knowing UNSC ship design.

She came to a cross roads and stopped, looking around for her goal; there, a small grated panel in the wall down low. She smiled and crouched down, ripping the grate from the wall with ease and inspecting it. These tunnels were used by automated janitorial units and doubled up as air-flow control tunnels. They ran throughout the ship, snaking between compartments. They were her ticket past the insurmountable enemy presence. They were also her worst nightmare.

Her heart rose into her throat as she confronted the hole. Memories of a dark, dank storm drain flashed across her vision. Crawling for miles, no-one else. All alone. She was alone now. By the time that the UNSC Search and Rescue teams had found her four days after the glassing of New Tasmania, she had grown to fear confined spaces. Her breath became ragged and panicked as those events came flooding back; a dreadful wailing siren, a mob of panicked people crushing the breath from within her, a white hot flash. She closed her eyes, willing the memories away and slowing her breathing, steeling herself for what must be done.

She stowed her weapon on her thigh holster, got down on all fours and crawled into the tunnel, fighting the almost irresistible urge to run and hide, every fibre of her being screaming at her to stop. She took a deep breath and moved further in, crawling through the cramped shaft. The edges of her armour scraped against the walls, and a fresh horrible possibility crawled its way into the forefront of her already cramped mind; what if she got stuck?

She forced her panic down as she carried on, thinking of her training to occupy herself. She had crawled through plenty of tighter spaces, under barbed wire and through thick rain, snow and hail. She had not let her memories stop her before, they would not defeat her now. As she wiggled and crawled, she focussed on her good memories, Commander Ambrose's speech at graduation came to mind. The one in which he'd finally called them Spartans.

Something toucher her leg. She whipped around so fast that she hit the faceplate of her helmet on the wall next to her, down at her ankle, a fat orange worm-like creature wriggled and coiled around her. Lekgolo worms. Hunters. She swore again and smacked her foot violently against the wall, crushing the worm with a horrible squelching feeling reverberating up her leg.

More of them. Her motion tracker lit up as hundreds of Lekgolo swarmed in on her, moving up the tunnel behind her and from in front of her. The worms were a hive-mind, and when a colony of them grouped up into one mass, the resulting bipedal Hunter was a truly powerful foe, extremely strong, armoured by the covenant in starship-grade battle armour and armed with a fuel rod cannon, they were extremely dangerous.

She pushed onwards, dragging herself free of the writhing mass of orange only for it to slither back around her ankle, encircling it like a wrought iron cuff. Lashing out bought a temporary reprieve, coupled with the satisfying squelching of half a dozen worms against the walls of the passage. However, the freedom was short-lived as she felt another iron fist grab her ankle, weighing her down, constricting, setting off klaxons and alerts inside her helmet as the gel layer of her suit stiffened up in protest.

Panicked breaths wracked her chest, fear rising into her throat as a horrifying realisation dawned on her; she couldn't move. The hydraulics and servos in the suit's joints whined and grinded, but her legs were resolutely cemented in the ball of worms. The bright halogen headlamps illuminated a nightmarish scene behind her as hundreds of lekgolo came together to form thick bands of interlocked units which anchored her in place, wrapped tightly around both ankles and slowly pulling her backwards, creeping up her legs. She could feel them wriggling and vibrating from within her armour, which increasingly warned her of immense pressure and imminent failure of her ceramic armour plates. She knew that the software tended on the cautious side when it came to armour integrity, but the mere fact that it had decided to alert her was more than enough cause to worry.

There was no way out. She fruitlessly clawed at the metal around her, desperately trying to free herself from the colony. Her fingers dug into the smooth surfaces around her, creating impromptu handholds which she clung onto, the alloy shuddering and deforming as the incredible forces at work bent it like rubber. She couldn't breathe. Her heart pounded in her chest, deafening her in the silent vacuum.

The world closed in. Walls compressing her, vision going dark. With her last sense, she shakily activated a subroutine in her armour. The HUD flagged a message "Confirm?" in bright red letters. She confirmed.

In a flash of dazzling yellow-tinged white, her suit dumped insane amounts of power into her shields, burning out the capacitor banks and attunement arrays and sending power surging through the otherwise invisible barrier. She shut her eyes and felt the fusion cell in the small of her back overheat and restart, her gel layers and undersuit barely able to counteract the heat. Her HUD flickered and died, the servos in her limbs slowed to a halt, leaving her frozen prone. As much as the overload had messed with her, it had decimated her adversary. When the fusion cell came back online and she was able to crane her neck around to see what had become of the seething colony, she was indescribably relieved and elated to see no sign of a cohesive worm form left. Just a whole lot of orange paste on every surface for about 3 metres of the shaft.

She crawled resolutely on, shielding fried and fusion cell running on borrowed time, through the belly of the corvette and finally emerged into the escape pod sector; a narrow hallway at the centre of the ship with four airlocks leading off of it, two on either side of the corridor. On the other end of each airlock were docked Class 1 Gnat lifepods, the smaller, less armoured variant of the Class 3 Bumblebee craft. They were her only chance out of this, and in more than one way. She ducked into one of the cramped pods, slipping into the pilots seat and checking that her emergency power re-routing had given them enough juice to initiate launch. The pods had their own independent power supplies, but it was far less damaging to launch a pod while the ship could initiate the procedure.

Her motion tracker alerted her to another contact moving in on her location. She abandoned her position and slealthily paced out into the corridor, SMG raised and primed with a grand total of 17 rounds left. The contact was dead ahead, through a set of doors back towards the bridge. A plan quickly formulated in her head as she dived into the opposite pod to the one she had just exited, waiting for the lone enemy to fall into her trap.

30 seconds later, she sprang into action as the silver-armoured elite stalked past her, she drew her knife across the back of the Sangheili's ankle, burying her blade up to the hilt in the corresponding thigh. The Alien arched his back in pain and rage and batted her away with one hand, crumpling her chest plate and sending her tumbling backward into the pod. As the warrior inspected his wounds and prowled towards her, she reached out and tapped a button on the Havoc warhead stashed underneath the pilot's seat before whipping herself upright and closing with the wounded alien.

She ducked under a clumsy swing with the dazzling energy sword and kicked the elite in the back, sending him down onto the floor that seconds before had been her resting place. Before the towering Elite could regain his footing, she dashed out of the pod and slammed the airlock's locking panel, causing a blast-proof door to slide forcefully into lace over the door. She primed the launch sequence and synchronised it to her HUD, moving quickly into the opposite pod and strapping into the pilot's seat, initiating her own launch sequence. Out of the window she could see the slowly spinning view; the planet below them then the blackness of space and then the menacing silhouette of a covenant corvette holding distance 20 kilometres away. She had to time this perfectly. Any deciation from the optimal release time would send her spinning off into space where the corvette could easily destroy her pod with point defense laser weaponry, or send the more deadly payload down towards the planet alongside her own trajectory. And she had to launch within the next 3 minutes before the four warheads she had left on a timer earlier in the weapons bay detonated, complying with the UNSC's Cole protocol and evaporating the entire ship.

It was during the next minute as she ran through circular motion equations in her head and calculated the optimal dispersion delay that she thanked her lucky stars that Maths and Physics had been her preferred subjects during Training. There was a fair amount of guesswork in her calculations, but with reasonable confidence she keyed the launch procedure for the Elite's pod. She felt the sudden jolt in the structure around her as the Gnat was violently propelled from the docking port by a more-than-necessary acceleration from the crafts rocket propulsion system. No need to give the covenant any more time to realise what was happening and destroy it. Then, precisely 23.8 seconds later, she launched her own pod, her body pressed against the seat as the acceleration pushed her Gnat away from the ship and back down towards the planet below and away from the impending nuclear detonations. She had timed it so that the bulk of the _Recluse_ shielded her from the covenant corvette's field of fire, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that she craned her head arund the headrest to see twin nuclear fireballs blooming in the vacuum, one much smaller and further away, dwarfed by the closer ball of flame.

As the destruction fell behind her and the pod began to brush the upper atmosphere, she smiled for the first time in a while and closed her eyes, letting the lifepod's automated navigation system take over. She was overdue a rest.

13 hours later, when the UNSC Expeditionary Force Warthog roared to a halt outside the crater in the glass left by the lifeboat's rough landing in the middle of the New Brighton Glasslands, 2000 miles away from the nearest inhabited sector, the perplexed Marines found not a half dozen bruised and battered Navy crewmen, but a single Spartan in charred and dented Mjolnir armour, sitting on a rock nearby and tapping her foot impatiently. Without a word she hoisted herself into the passenger's seat of the LRV, gave her rank and ID code:

"Petty Officer 1st class Rachel-Gamma-Zero-Two-Three."

And then slumped in her seat and slept for the whole 12-hour journey back to civilisation.


	5. Decimation

**Sergeant /:ERROR:NAME REDACTED:\\\, 2** **nd** **Tank Platoon, B Company, 3** **rd** **Battalion, 22** **nd** **Armoured Division, Forward Operating Base "Skywatch", Ariel, 15** **th** **April 2449, 0500 Local time.**

"Hands off cocks and feet in socks ladies" She bellowed in her best Drill-Sergeant-on-the-first-day-of-boot-camp voice as she strutted up and down the rows of beds, tapping the bulged barrel of her M6 service pistol on each of the metal frames as she passed them, adding a whine of ringing bells to her barking; a perfect assault on the fragile eardrums of the awakening Marines. "We've got some bugs to kill, I want you up and in cans in 20, move it!"

The moaning soldiers dragged themselves from their bunks in various states of undress and started shoving their aching limbs into sleeves of dirty fatigues. The entire battalion had been in almost non-stop combat for a fortnight, and she knew that it was only a matter of time before her platoon started to crack. Technically it was 2nd Lieutenant Adams' platoon, but the officer's relationship with the men was not the same as hers. He commanded them, but she had known them since they got out of basic. He was a replacement officer for their previous CO, whose vehicle had taken a direct hit from enemy orbital fire.

Within 10 minutes, every one of the 11 soldiers of 2nd Platoon was stood to attention in full combat gear in front of the four heavily armoured hulks that were the platoon's M914 Ursus Heavy Battle Tanks. The super-heavy tanks were the UNSCs most powerful armoured fighting vehicle on the field, each armed with a 150mm smoothbore gun mounted in a squat, angular turret located towards the rear of the 15-metre long chassis. Lieutenant Adams strode across the courtyard of the FOB and addressed the platoon.

"Covenant forces attacked Fort Detrick last night at approximately 24:15 hours, the 15th ODST was hit hard; wraiths, spectres, eidolons, limited air support and heavy infantry including multiple confirmed reports of Hunter units." The young officer looked around at the assembled troops. "The battalion is moving to the outskirts of Aros to assault their left flank and relieve the pressure on them. We will be working closely with Army infantry and Air Force and Marine birds, so play nice." He smirked slightly "Mount up, give 'em hell and come back in one piece. Today's radio handle is Copperhead, good hunting."

The entire platoon, herself included snapped a salute at the officer as he strode over to a Warthog Light Reconnaissance Vehicle and clambered aboard. She turned smartly and addressed the men;

"You heard the man, mount up and follow lead vehicle, lets move it 2nd Platoon." She shouted as they chorused their assent and broke formation, jumping up onto the four-bogey tracks and entering the open hatches, three men to a vehicle; one gunner, one commander and one driver. The smaller MBTs of the UNSC, the Scorpions and the Grizzlies only had single or two-man crews, but she liked the setup of the heavier vehicles. Her crew, the two other men manning Copperhead 1 were Corporal Greene and PFC Cito. The three of them had fought together with Black Beast, the name of their particular tank, for four years now, and had developed an excellent rapport in that time.

"Alright guys, same shit, different day, you ready?" She asked as she grabbed a utility handle on the side of the forward left tread and hauled herself onto the armour plating, preparing the remove the muzzle cover from the barrel. She knew that they were ready, but it was their routine, before every mission they went through the script. Tank crews were a superstitious lot, and they all took some level of comfort in the familiar. For the crew of Copperhead 1, that stemmed from the recited words that they spoke.

"Hell yeah Sarge, hit hard, hit true" Cito grinned as he lowered himself into the driver's compartment in the main hull of the vehicle, giving a thumbs up and pulling the heavy hatch across the entrance.

"Back into the fiery crucible" Greene muttered, rubbing the last of the sleep from his eyes and sighing.

"All right then" She breathed, skittering along the body of the hull and climbing up the turret, slipping into the main fighting compartment just after Green had, taking a second to pause while on top of the turret and looking around at the area surrounding their company's quarters; immediately adjacent to their courtyard on two sides were 1st and 3rd platoon of B company, each company armed with a total of 12 vehicles. Further beyond their spaces was a sea of beige tents, pre-fabricated command buildings and vehicles. A company was closest, also using Ursus heavies, C and D companies were somewhere in the chaos, both used more common Scorpion MBTs. She wondered how many of these hundreds of vehicles would make it back to base.

She shook those morbid thoughts from her mind as she sat down in the commander's seat inside the turret and slid the heavy plate of armour over the hole, sealing the crew in. Technically they didn't need to open either of the hatches for several weeks. Each fighting vehicle was sealed against biological, chemical or radiological attacks and were vacuum tight, with enough survival rations and water to keep them going for a month easily. She hoped it never came to that.

"Cito, get us rolling, I want to make it to the AO by 0630" She ordered, initialising the tank's complicated weapons, targeting and defensive systems.

"Affirmative" she heard him through the earpiece built into her helmet, and the vehicle around her shook and roared as the engine bellowed into life. She suppressed a childlike grin of excitement as she checked the weapons; main gun check, coaxial MG check, Trebuchet Missile system check, commander's MG check. They were good to go. She flicked a switch next to her to link the vehicle with the other tanks of 2nd Platoon as they started moving.

"Copperhead 1, radio check."

"Copperhead 2 check"

"Copperhead 3 check"

"Copperhead 4 check"

On her screen in front of her, the icons of the four tanks blinked into life on the blue tactical map, which displayed real-time topographical and satellite images of the area along with estimated troop strengths and unit monikers. As the hull around her rumbled and shifted as they moved onwards, she studied the maps and reports in detail, preparing herself for the battle to come.

"Sarge?" The American-accented voice broke through the cacophony of the engine and radio messages.

"Yes Corporal" She answered, not tearing her eyes away from the display.

"When you gonna give Cito the 20 creds you owe him?"

A wry smile pricked the corners of her mouth "When hell freezes over, I took that Gator's head clean off"

She heard a chuckle over the internal comms "Come on now Sarge, at best that was a throat shot, besides, there wasn't exactly much left to prove that it was. I need the money for my little _ninos_."

She shook her head, smiling "You don't have any _ninos_ Cito, don't bullshit me."

"You say that Sarge, but with the amount of notches on my bedpost, there's bound to be a whole bunch of little baby Citos running around the Inner Colonies"

She snorted "If I even thought for a second that any of it would actually go to those potential monsters, I'd hand it over in a heartbeat." This elicited chuckles of laughter from both of her compatriots. "Tell you what Cito, you run any of them sons of bitches down in this thing, I'll pony up and even clean the gunk out of the treads, how's that sound?"

"Ooh Sarge, you drive a hard bargain, can we throw in the number of your friend in Regimental HQ, that cute blonde with the glasses?" The man was relentless.

"I'll think about it Private" she shook her head so only Greene could see, and the gunner smiled widely and rolled his eyes.

"I take that as a yes Sarge, no take-backs."

They spent the rest of the journey to the staging zone in relative quiet, with a few insults here and there being hurled between various vehicles. The background banter fell away as the column of vehicles, with the LT's Warthog leading the four tanks, trundled onwards to war. They'd been fighting the covenant over the same few patches of land for weeks now, and there was enormous pressure on the entire Regiment to make this protracted land engagement a decisive win before a more significant alien naval force entered orbit. The first wave of attack on the colony had been pitiful given how important the Titanium mines scattered across the planet's surface were to the UNSC war efforts. A handful of frigates and one CCS-class battlecruiser with accompanying escorts. A Naval taskforce was dispatched and the two opposing armadas had been duking it out in orbit ever since. They heard snippets of progress; most of the enemy's escort vessels had been eliminated, at the cost of the taskforce's three destroyers _Horizon_ , _Origin_ , and _Maelstrom,_ the Navy was sending a larger response force with carrier and battleship support, ETA 3 days. They had to hold out until then.

At least they were fighting on a rather beautiful colony. She'd fought on and off across the colonies for 15 years, through the blistering desert winds of New Mosul and the thick jungle forests of Benrit, and at last she'd found a temperate, pretty planet to desecrate with HE. If it weren't for the distant sounds of heavy artillery fire and explosions echoing through the valleys, this continent would be full of ambient noises, chirping avian species, babbling brooks, pine trees creaking in the wind. The normally baby blue sky was now marred by streaks of thick black smoke as forests burned up ahead.

"Copperhead, this is Copperhead Actual, we've received orders to assault the enemy positions up ahead in the town of Aros. Be warned, there are fresh reports of heavy armour rolling in from infantry pushing through the sub-urbs." Adams voice broke through the anxious silence that had fallen on the platoon as the sound of fighting grew louder. "Weapons free and good hunting, Sergeant, you have the lead."

The Warthog peeled away from the column and skidded up the hillside to their left along a dirt path, probably to the company observation post at the peak. The four tanks moved ever onwards, cruising towards the now visible town at 30mph. The road leading into the suburbs had been reduced to a smouldering crater by enemy orbital support yesterday, so as they approached the junction their vehicle turned 90 degrees and headed off road, leading the rest of the platoon with them.

As she was jostled around inside the vehicle due to the uneven ground, she tensed herself; this was the riskiest part of their journey, the mad dash across a kilometre of open field towards the relative shelter of the buildings ahead. No cover from air attack, no concealed route. And at their 12 o'clock was a warzone, punctuated now by the chaotic cacophony of sustained gunfire and the high-pitched whine of plasma weaponry.

Her heart in her throat, she activated the radio. "Wildfire 1, this is Copperhead 1, we're on hot approach to your position from the south west, what's the situation, over."

The response she got from the ODST company was almost drowned out by the sounds of war. "Copperhead 1, we read you, you picked a hell of a time to join us, we've got Wraiths and Hunters pounding our positions, along with heavy sniper fire coming from the Hospital upper floors, over."

She breathed heavily, adrenaline already coursing through her body as they approached the back yard of the housing ahead of them, the picket white fences standing in defiance of the bloodshed going on around them. "Copy that Wildfire 1, keep your heads down, friendly Ursuses coming in."

As they crested the slight incline and reduced the proud fencing to splinters, time seemed to slow down in her own mind, she could see the individual slivers of wood tumbling through the air on the external camera feeds, see the smoke billowing out of the second floor of the house directly ahead, and felt the g-forces as the heavy tank slammed into the ground and charged forwards, flanked by the others as they thundered towards the street round the side of the houses.

"Fan out, mark your targets and look out for infantry" She ordered as the platoon entered into the engagement. Cito pulled the tank up into the cover of the house itself, allowing them to observe the situation without drawing too much fire;

It was pandemonium. The wide suburban street was alive with tracer rounds and plasma trails as infantry units exchanged fire, the human forces' line was directly ahead down the street flanked by detached houses. The tanks had broken through the human rear line and now saw the firefight from behind the losing side. 300 metres ahead of them, covenant infantry lurked behind every scrap of cover, low walls around driveways, behind expensive family saloons, behind mail boxes and parked cars on the street, but also in the upper floors of homes on either side of the street. Time to remedy that.

"Take us forward, I see enemy marksmen in the top floor of the yellow-painted house at 1 o'clock, fire when ready." She said calmly, highlighting the targets using her console, which would show the gunner on his screen where to shoot.

"Firing" Greene shouted as the main gun belched a 150mm shell at over 2000 m/s into the target. The High Explosive detonated and blew the house's walls apart, sending splintered wood in a million directions and vaporising the inhabitants.

"Good effect." She commented as the tank lurched forwards onto the mainstreet. She checked the TACMAP, which showed Copperheads 2-4 performing similar manoeuvres on parallel streets, firing on enemy positions and moving. "Next target, enemy infantry behind shuttle bus, 11:30, fire co-ax."

"Understood." The chugging of the .50 calibre coaxial machine gun started up as they inched forwards, the ODST troopers falling in behind the bulk of the tank to use it as portable cover. One of them had his face pressed right up to one of the rear-view cameras, and his petrified visage filled one of the feeds, momentarily distracting her from the task as she called out further targets.

"Copperhead 1, enemy infantry, low, 2 o'clock behind the garage wall" A fire request blared through her headset from one of the squad leaders in the battle around her. Which one, she didn't have time to find out.

"Greene, focus on the snipers in the hospital, HE, 12th floor, 11 o'clock." She ordered before turning her attention on the requested area. Thermal did indeed show multiple infantry signatures in a basement garage. She didn't have time to try and flush them out with MG fire, and the infantry guys wouldn't want to do it either. So she flicked another switch on the wall by her head and grabbed the control stick to swivel around a bulky-looking 4-barelled rocket launcher system which sat squat on the roof of the turret. She confirmed the target and launched one Trebuchet HE missile into the building. The fiery explosion bloomed on her monitor as the house's load-bearing walls were disintegrated, causing the whole three-storey building to collapse, effectively burying any enemies left in their hidey hole.

"Greene, how we doin' on the snipers?" She demanded, deactivating the missile system and returning her attention on the gunners' efforts. A smoking hole was now visible in the side of the hospital 12 floors up. Glittering shards of glass still fell in a cloud of sparkling light from the impact, along with larger pieces of debris fluttering in the wind as they tumbled.

"Targets neutralised." The man said.

"Good shot, engage any legitimate targets with the co-ax, I think we've rattled our sabre long enough." She ordered, activating the turret-mounted commander's MG and unloading on covenant positions. They could use the main gun to decimate the enemies, but ammunition was limited and they didn't need to when they had other weaponry available. The main gun was most effective and efficient in taking out enemy armour, its use on infantry targets was mostly psychological; break the enemy's resolve with a show of force, then use more efficient weapons to pick them off.

"Wildfire 1 this is Copperhead 1, any location on that enemy armour, all we've got here is infantry, over." She asked.

"Copperhead 1, enemy mortar tanks have been sighted three blocks North-East of your current position, they're making life very difficult for our scouts and the 301st Infantry, over."

"Let's go get 'em boys" the tank crawled up the street, machine guns blazing as the covenant crumbled. For all the alien conglomerate's successes in the field, in land engagements the UNSC had the upper hand.

Bolts of plasma splattered across the armour plating as they pushed up the street providing both cover and fire support to the ODSTs as they moved from house to house clearing them of aliens. One of the front-mounted view cameras was taken out by a lucky plasma pistol round. Minor damage compared to the amount of firepower they were laying down.

"Enemy light armour spotted, 12 o'clock" Cito announced, highlighting the two Spectre-class LAVs and the half a dozen Ghost scout vehicles up ahead. Like all the covenant vehicles, the Spectres and Ghosts used repulsor technology to float above the ground instead of using wheels or tracks, and their curved insectoid shape made them starkly different to the angular profile of most UNSC vehicles.

"Greene, you have the gun." She ordered as the opened fire with the commander's gun, peppering the distant Ghosts. She also loosed a salvo of 40mm Trebuchet rockets at the enemy armour before dragging her attention back to the close infantry.

Before she'd even fully registered the silhouette of the weapon cradled in the Elite's hand, she'd already begun forming the words;

"Fuel rod!"

The glowing green projectile seemed to crawl through the air towards them as she moved to fire countermeasures. But she was a fraction of a second too late. The round impacted against the front right tread bogey and detonated, sending a shockwave through the chassis around them. Alerts blared from consoles as smoke began seeping into the compartment as they coughed and righted themselves. Only bruises. And ringing ears. Damn, she was going to get tinnitus at this rate.

"Everyone okay?" She asked as she assessed the damage, the armour had taken the brunt of the impact, but the tread wouldn't take another hit like that. She raced to target the Elite who'd fired the shot, but he was already dead, a perfect hole torn through the front of its armoured chest. She'd have to buy whoever fired the shot a beer.

"Good, think I broke my nose, but I'll live." Cito sounded more annoyed than hurt, probably at the potential of ruining his pretty face.

"I'm good boss." Greene said through gritted teeth, wrapping his hands around the gun controls again "Firing."

"Get us moving" she ordered, strafing a low brick wall with MG rounds, forcing the covenant to duck into cover as chips of their refuge spun everywhere.

Infantry moved up alongside them, and once again she found herself marvelling at the bravery of these Helljumpers. They were fearless, running full pelt at enemy positions, dodging needle fire and plasma bolts, tossing frag grenades through doorways and spraying automatic fire in through windows. She wasn't sure what combat stims these guys took before this kind of op, or if they were just running on pure adrenaline, but whatever was fuelling them it was doing the trick. However, they weren't invincible. Her eyes were dragged to a trio of black-suited troopers, two dragging a third back behind the tank. They couldn't survive a few shots. The Ursus could.

The main gun roared again, resulting in the last of the light armour exploding into a thousand pieces, ripping the nearby covenant infantry apart with the shrapnel. It wasn't pretty, blue and purple blood ran thick in the street's gutters, mixed with bright red. This planet would be hard won.

"Sighted, covenant armour, dead ahead!" Cito called out, not letting off of the gas.

"They're trying to run" She murmured, spotting the pair of Wraith mortar tanks slowly moving across the street ahead of them from behind a convenience store. "Open up, hit the lead vehicle first."

"Yes ma'am." Greene acknowledged, and less than a second later the lead tank was a blazing blue fireball. The other vehicle let loose a burning blue mortar round, which arced gracefully through the air before colliding with the roof of a house 10 metres to their left, destroying the structure and sending debris everywhere.

"Firing" She announced and targeted the second wraith with the Trebuchet and letting loose a double-tap of rockets which screamed through the air and impacted with the curved purple metal, engulfing the vehicle in another roaring blue blaze.

"Good hit Copperhead 1" Came the jubilant cry from an infantryman nearby.

The battlefield quietened as the ODSTs mopped up the last of the covenant contingent in the sector, with the help of their .50 cals. As the adrenaline ebbed from her system, she realised how much she hurt; the attack by the Fuel Rod canon had shaken them all about, and she was no feeling the effects, her left wrist was aching from where it had been bent back against a control stick, and her right cheek was sporting a fantastic bruise.

"Copperhead 1, this is Copperhead Actual" The lieutenant's voice crackled through the comms.

"Copy Copperhead Actual, send it."

"Good work in the sub-urbs, seems that the covenant are falling back to the University campus with more armoured support heading up from Valley 21, along with fresh air support. We caught them off guard, they're retreating on all fronts, the 16th Infantry sends their regards. Your orders are to move on Aros University and neutralise Wraith units that have been bombarding D company for an hour. Be warned, Hunter units are in play, over." The Lieutenant sounded strained

"Copy all sir, we're Oscar Mike." She responded as 2nd Platoon regrouped in a Supermarket parking lot. Their tank was definitely the worst for wear, a large black impact mark scored across the front half of the vehicle.

As they prepared to move out, she heard a tapping on the roof hatch. Immediately she was on heightened alert, drawing her sidearm and checking the cameras, a young freshly shaven soldier in digital camouflage armour was crouched next to the hatch, looking around nervously. He must have been from the infantry company taking cover in the store.

She undid the hatch and slid it back, looking up to face the Soldier, relishing in the fresh air as he stuttered.

"Ma'am, any chance that you guys are going to AU?" He said, twitching slightly, eyes weary.

"That we are, Corporal?" She asked, curious.

"Perez, A company, 3rd Army Infantry, wondering if you could give us a lift ma'am."

She snorted, settling back down into her seat and beginning to slide back the hatch "Sure thing soldier, key into radio frequency 16F."

She watched on the external cameras as the rest of the infantry company rushed over through the parked cars and hauled themselves onto the treads and body of each tank, about 10 men to a tank, with more keeping up close behind as they pulled out of the parking lot and headed towards the tower of black smoke above the skyline.

They didn't make it halfway before fire fell from the sky. Dozens of Banshee fighters descended on the column, which had been joined by half a dozen M12 Warthogs, two of which were armed with dual rocket launcher turrets in lieu of the standard .50 calibre minigun. Plasma splashed down on them, and the infantry immediately disembarked and rushed for cover, firing small arms back at the squadron harassing them. The turret swivelled around rapidly as Greene tried to get a shot on a low-flying fighter with the main gun, but the damn things were too fast.

"Wait until they make a pass along the street" she yelled as she primed the Anti-Aircraft system of the Trebuchet and the M41 LAAGs of the Warthogs opened up on the attackers.

Green bolts streaked towards them from above as the fliers made another run, loosing fuel rod rounds as one of their flight was brought down by a salvo of missiles from the M12Rs' rocket launchers.

"One down" One of the Warthog gunners said over the local comms. They had been part of the 6th mechanized, but their HQ had taken a direct hit from orbital support, so for the moment they were latched onto their platoon.

"Look out-" Copperhead 3 disappeared in a blaze of green rounds as a trio of banshee bombs struck at once as if from nowhere.

"Copperhead 3!" She shouted, heart racing and filled with dread "Assessment"

Silence, then broken by coughing as Lance Corporal Buren responded "Smith's dead, me and Pranke are good, weapons system inoperable."

"Get out of there, hitch a ride in the Hogs" She ordered, dread settling into the pit of her stomach. Smith had been a quiet man, but she had always respected his skill in keeping the crew of Copperhead 3 together.

The Infantry had been badly hit too, 6 killed outright by the blast, with several more wounded. She made a decision.

"Any UNSC Air units, this is Copperhead 1, requesting immediate air support and Medevac ASAP."

"Roger that Copperhead 1, this is Viking 7-1 responding, a flight of Wombats diverted to target enemy air assets in your AO, ETA 2 mikes, over."

"Copy Viking 7-1, much obliged." She acknowledged as the banshees made another pass, strafing the street with blue plasma bolts. She spotted an infantry grunt peek out from behind cover as they soared over head, hefting an M57 Pilum rocket launcher onto his shoulders and taking aim. The rocket snaked upwards and detonated in the dead centre of mass of the lead flier, sending it tumbling downwards in a shower of blue plasma and purple metal.

The Drone fighters arrived before the banshees could make another pass and drew them away from the column, and so they moved on, down one tank and one M12 to stay behind to cover the wounded as the Falcons came in to evacuate them.

Before too long they were approaching the red-brick University. It was now 1pm. Wait, no it couldn't be. She shook her head, had they really been fighting for 5 hours? She tore herself back to reality and observed the situation; they were trundling through the wooded area just before the University building, up a slight slope of well-cut grass with trees on either side. Either side of them, Copperhead 2 and 4 scanned the horizon, the infantry following close behind, using them as cover. Weird, they hadn't encountered any covenant yet, where were they?

"Stay frosty" She whispered into the comms, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. She scanned the area with the external cameras, scrutinising for any sign of-

"Hunters!" One of the Warthogs' drivers alerted them as a pair of massive smashed their way through an exterior wall in the building up ahead and fired their assault canons. The three tanks opened fire and reduced the two threats to orange paste. The two fired rounds went wide, but the infantry dispersed from the tanks and fled into cover.

"That's it?" The driver of Copperhead 2 asked incredulously.

"Copperhead 1 this is Copperhead Actual, we've got something big closing in on your location, stand by."

Her blood ran cold. She knew what that meant.

"Copperhead 2 and 4, pull back to the street, repeat, pull back,"

Too late.

The colossal Scarab Heavy Assault Platform lumbered over the building, its tower-block articulated legs smashing through the structure as its main energy canon charged up and fired, sending a stream of superheated plasma towards them, the beam scythed between their vehicle and Copperhead 4, splashing globules of plasma onto the tread armour and eating into it.

"Mother fucker!" Cito shouted as he threw the tank into reverse gear and backed away while Greene raised the barrel of the main gun and fired at the enormous body of the legged vehicle. The round impacted and detonated, with no apparent effect, the Assault Platform merely shifted around on its four legs to aim the massive focus cannon at their vehicle. At the tail end of the massive mech, a huge triangular tail weapon glowed bright blue as it sent pulses of plasma down upon their position. One round splashed over Copperhead 2's chassis, instantly melting through several layers of composite armour and detonating the rounds stored in the tank. The shockwave pulsed through them, knocking her about even more inside the fighting compartment.

"They got 2!" Greene shouted over the ringing in all their ears, aiming the gun carefully at one of the articulated joints in one of the Scarab's four legs.

"Aim for the joints!" She ordered over the local comms, hoping that whatever was left of the infantry and Hogs would hear her and focus their fire. She fired a salvo of Trebuchet rockets at the vehicle's front-left knee joint, exposing some sort of hydraulics or control mechanism underneath the armour.

"Copperhead 1, this is Diamondback 1." She recognised the codename for 1st platoon. "We're engaging Type-47 Heavy Assault Platform on your location, over."

"Popping smoke" Greene announced and a series of cracks reverberated through the chassis as multiple 40mm grenade canisters located around the vehicle's outer plating detonated, launching airburst EM and visible smoke canisters. The air around them in a 20 metre radius was suddenly filled with a thick grey miasma which hopefully should stop the Scarab from hitting its target.

They retreated, not able to see the enemy, but hearing the deadly screeches as its main gun charged and fired multiple times, flashes of blue and green visible through the smoke. More and more units were focussing their fire on the Scarab and the rest of the covenant holed up around it. She tracked at least two more armoured Companies diverting from infantry engagements and a flight of Hornets streaming across the city towards them. This was the last hub of resistance in the city. One final effort was all that remained.

"You guys ever hear how one of these things got taken down on Duna?" She asked, an idea suddenly forming in her mind.

"What? All I know is it's gonna take a metric shit-ton of ordinance to kill it" Greene panted.

"No. It's not. Cito, take us back up the lawn."

"But Sarge-"

"Do it now." She barked, hailing Diamondback 1. "Sergeant Silva, that you?"

"Affirmative, what's the game plan?"

"I need 1st platoon to distract that ugly SOB, draw its fire so that its back is facing Copperhead, how copy?" She rushed, mind and adrenaline pulsing.

"Copy, you'd better know what you're doing, diamondback out."

She switched back to local. "Copperhead 4, follow us in, you're on clean-up detail, anything as the feet of that Scarab not in UNSC colours, waste it, understood?"

A moment of silence "Copy that Copperhead 1, we're Oscar Mike."

The two remaining tanks of 2nd platoon trundled out of cover and back through the thick smoke, and the external feed picked up a huge intensification of fire on the Scarab. By the time they emerged from the blanket of smoke, the gargantuan platform has turned in place above the university and was firing its tail gun down at a target on the other side of the building. At the base of its massive legs, an army of covenant infantry and armour had emerged from the treeline, dozens of light vehicles, Ghosts and Spectres, a few Wraiths firing their mortar canons in the same direction as the Scarab was firing. Copperhead 4 stopped dead and began firing, crippling two of the Wraiths before the enemy had realised where the fire was coming from.

"Greene, you see the back of that thing? Right under where its tail gun sits?" She asked, tagging the armour plate in question on the targeting system. "AP rounds quick."

"I gotcha" He whispered, opening fire on the armour plate as she loosed the last of the tank's Trebuchet missiles at the same targets.

The assisting M12Rs opened fire as well, sending a total of a dozen HE rockets screaming into the already weakened plate, blowing off a huge chunk of armour from its rear. There. The power core of the entire walker was exposed, a bright red target in a murky smokescreen as plasma conduits leaked.

"Fire Greene, now" She ordered, frantically hailing the infantry and Hogs that had been working with them "UNSC forces, if you're within 150 metres of that thing, retreat on the double, Copperhead will cover you."

As she finished her order, the main gun signalled that it was ready to fire again, and as soon as the breach had cleared it did, sending a 50kg High-Explosive round into the core of the walker, ruining all coolant or stabilising systems and sending it into critical meltdown. The tank's sensors picked up increasing thermal and EM levels as the core overheated and began its final dispensation. In short, in about 1 minute the Scarab was going to blow up.

"Free reign" She told Greene, who immediately opened fire with the coaxial gun on the fleeing alien infantry, cutting them down as they tried to fire on the human soldiers sprinting away from the impending meltdown.

The tank began a slow crawl backwards as an M12 which had been trapped under enemy fire sped past them, its gunner spraying rounds backwards at the armour and infantry at the top of the hill. The main gun belched more AP and HE rounds into the alien defenders, interrupting the constant stream of lead coming from her own MG and the coaxial. Copperhead 4 did the same, punishing the alien invaders for all the lives they'd lost today. Squads of soldiers retreated with them, and pairs of Hornet VTOL attack craft soared overhead launching salvos of rockets and autocannon fire into the building.

Then the world went white as the plasma drives in the scarab detonated, ripping the vehicle apart and killing everything within 50 metres either through raining down liquid hot plasma or tearing it apart with shrapnel. The remains of the vehicle slumped down into a mangled mess of metal and masonry as the building underneath crumbled. The shockwave almost blew a Hornet out of the sky, and the explosion was visible from orbit. Even inside a hermetically sealed fighting compartment the sound of the explosion was deafening.

She slumped in her seat as the radio lit up with whooping and cheering, high on adrenaline. "Holy shit."

"You said it Sarge." Cito's voice was heavy with fatigue "We'd better get some medals for this shit, that was awesome."

Greene just nodded, eyes closed.

"Come on, we'd better go and clean up any survivors, besides, I've still got to run over one of these bastards." She could just imagine the smirk on Cito's face, and she laughed with him.

"You're right, lets go mop up" Sergeant Yennifer Strassbourg said, slapping Greene on the shoulder and grinning from ear to ear. Today had been a good day. There weren't too many of those lately.


End file.
